On the occasion of Constitution Day, CLPR invites you to a breakfast roundtable on ‘Anxieties of the Foreign and the Indigenous in India’s Constitutional Tradition’. Mr. Arun Thiruvengadam, Associate Professor at the Azim Premji University will be the speaker at the event. He will be joined by his colleague, Mr. Sitharamam Kakarala.

Mr. Thiruvengadam will, through his talk, seek to highlight the longstanding debate over the ‘foreign’ character of the Indian Constitution and the tensions that such a focus reveals about fundamental constitutional issues and values in India. Such debates began within the Constituent Assembly, and have resurfaced from time to time, and especially when an NDA administration has held the reins of power in Delhi. Prime Minister Vajpayee’s tenure witnessed a raging debate over the BJP government’s initiative to constitute a National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution, where the ‘foreign-ness’ of the original Constitution was commented upon. In the current era, under Prime Minister Modi’s tenure, doubts have been raised about the legitimacy of entrenched constitutional values such as secularism, which are portrayed as being antithetical to Indian cultural values. The talk will cover how these tensions occurred historically, during the making of the Constitution of India and how they have extended to contemporary times, through debates over the use of comparative law in constitutional adjudication across a range of issues such as the basic structure doctrine, PIL, the social rights jurisprudence of the Indian courts, and LGBT rights.